The present invention relates to the configuration of functional capabilities in a data processing system.
On Demand processor and memory capacity needs more physical capacity installed than enabled on computer systems. As long as there is dormant physical capacity available such capacity can be activated as the customer need demands. In J. Probst et al “Flexible configuration and concurrent upgrade for the IBM eServer z900” and the patent U.S. Pat. No. 7,194,616 such scenario is described in more detail. The use of dormant physical capacity to compensate lost physical capacity of a computer system is shown WO 2007/006592 A2.
To prevent unauthorized activation of dormant capacity the activation is usually protected by a control system utilizing encryption as well as further secure methods binding the entitlement data to a specific machine. For example, patent U.S. Pat. No. 5,982,899 describes a method utilizing an unchangeable unique identifier that may be located within an integrated circuit chip.
A state of the art computer system may be comprised of multiple processor books each of them providing processor and memory resources. The amount of resources may be identical or differ between the multiple processor books. All those resources may be combined to a single SMP (Symmetrical Multi Processor) system such that it does not matter how the enabled capacity is allocated from the physical capacity provided by multiple processor books, i.e. the entitlement for permanent and for temporary capacity is specified and charged at the system level.
The example implementation of a hardware capacity 100 of a computer system shown in FIG. 1 utilizes the unchangeable identifiers (ECID: Engineering Change IDentifier) 110, 120, 130, 140 of each single processor book 150, 160, 170, 180 to bind the entitlements for the physical resources of the corresponding processor books to their hardware implementation and prevent usage of the entitlement data contained in the associated entitlement records 115, 125, 135, 145 for other processor books residing in the same computer system or in a different computer system. Therefore, there is a one to one relationship between a particular processor book and the associated entitlement record.
There is one major disadvantage with this approach: Sometimes processor books need to be exchanged for repair or upgrade purposes. When a processor book is being exchanged carrying the ECID for the encrypted entitlement record this record also must be exchanged to match the ECID of the replacing book and a new entitlement record with the appropriate processor and memory definitions must be created and loaded into the machine. Since the data is machine configuration specific it cannot be stored as a generic record but must be created for example on-line utilizing the current authorization definition of the failing processor book. This needs on-line access to the critical asset protection system. Also the certificate of tokens concept described in IPCOM000139433D does not solve this problem.